Judge Puts Off North Trial Until After Fall Campaign

April 13, 1988|The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- The judge handling the Iran-contra case said on Tuesday that he would not hold the trial amid the fall election campaign.

The decision by Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell is good news for Vice President George Bush, the likely Republican presidental nominee. Polls of primary voters have found that one of Bush`s major weaknesses among voters who dislike him is suspicion about any role he may have played in the American arms dealings with Iran.

``I have a concern about the wisdom and the fairness -- in the broadest sense of the word -- about having this trial under way while ballots are being cast,`` Gesell said in the first pretrial hearing on the case. His remarks came in a discussion of scheduling for the trial.

Gesell did not set a trial date but said he had been hoping to begin as soon as July; defense lawyers said they would need until as late as March of next year to prepare. Prosecutors said the trial would take at least three months and defense lawyers said it might last even longer.

The defendants in the case are Oliver L. North, the former Marine lieutenant colonel and White House aide; Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser; Richard V. Secord, a retired Air Force major general, and Albert Hakim. Hakim and Secord were business partners involved in the arms deals. All four sat at the defense table on Tuesday while more than two dozen lawyers for the defense and prosecution debated the mechanics and timing of the case.

One of the major issues under discussion on Tuesday was the handling of the more than 100,000 pages of classified documents gathered through the investigation by Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor.

Defense lawyers complained that Walsh had been slow in turning over documents, and that government security officials had been imposing onerous security restrictions that prevented lawyers with security clearances from talking about classified matters with clients like Hakim who never held a clearance.

Gesell told Walsh that he would not tolerate security arrangements that interfered with rights of the defendants. He invited the defense to challenge the procedures and he said prosecutors would have to drop the case if they could not provide the accused with access to the material they would be entitled to in any criminal trial.

``The defense has to be permitted to prepare its case and be allowed to have the material the government has that may be of value to him,`` Gesell said. ``It`s so fundamental.``

He said ``the classification system has to be adjusted to meet the needs of the case, or the case will collapse.``

Declassification of the documents in the Iran-Contra case is being handled by a committee of government officials from several agencies. Gesell asked prosecutors on Tuesday to turn the material over to defense lawyers in its classified form so they could sift through the documents and determine which they would need.

In the Iran-Contra case, the documents cover what administration officials say are some of the most sensitive intelligence operations conducted by the government.

In another matter, Gesell said he would hold a hearing on April 25 on whether the evidence in the case had been ``tainted`` by the congressional testimony by three of the defendants. The three, North, Hakim and Poindexter, all testified last year under grants of immunity, which means their statements to Congress cannot be used by prosecutors as evidence or investigative leads.

One of the principal defense arguments advanced so far by lawyers for the three is that Walsh`s case was tainted by the congressional hearings.